About

Carola Emkow has a Magistra Artium in English Philology and Romance Studies from the Free University of Berlin and a PhD in linguistics from La Trobe University, Research Centre for Linguistic Typology. Her PhD dissertation was a description of the Araona language, an Amazonian language spoken by about 150 people in a remote area of Northwestern Bolivia.

She has participated in two typological projects, one on internsifiers and reflexives and the other on reciprocal markers.

She has held teaching positions at the Free University of Berlin, Institute for English Philology, teaching all levels of linguistics in the BA programme and as in the MA programme for teachers as well as at the University of Leipzig, Department of Linguistics.

Carola’s interests are in language documentation and description with focus on fieldwork in Bolivia and Papua New Guinea, linguistic typology, ethnolinguistics and cognition.

Research Projects

Together with her colleague Regina Knapp (anthropologist), under the leadership of Prof. Bernard Comrie, Carola currently documents the Bena Bena language, a Papuan language spoken in the Eastern highlands of Papua New Guinea. The project is funded by the Documentation of Endangered Languages (DoBeS) programme of the Volkswagen foundation. The project is funded for a period of three years, ending in 2015.